VMware Welcomed Into OpenStack Foundation

The OpenStack Foundation has officially launched and is moving ahead with its mandate to foster open, interoperable cloud computing.

In a board of directors meeting last week, the OpenStack Foundation opened for business and, among its first acts, accepted virtualization giant and one-time OpenStack rival VMware as a full-fledged board member, and it set an Oct. 15 release date for the launch of its Folsom cloud networking project.

Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack's executive director, said that after a year of preparation, the foundation is ready to move ahead with a $10 million budget and lead the more than 150 companies that have joined.

The inclusion of VMware gives breadth to the foundation, as what was once seen as a rival is now part of the open-source cloud ecosystem.

Bryce said there is no merit to the proposition that VMware might have joined the foundation to gain intelligence for its own cloud plans.

"It's hard to be more open than we are, so there's not much value in spying," Bryce said in an interview with CRN.

The Folsom release concentrates on cloud networking, offering more automation and virtualization features to network management, Bryce said.

"The cloud has been about computing and storage so far, and networking has been kind of left behind," Bryce said. "[Folsom] automates the kinds of network activities that network operators were doing manually on network devices."

Network virtualization company Nicira was one of the technical leaders in the release, Bryce said. VMware purchased Nicira for $1.2 billion in July.

OpenStack was started in 2010 as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace and NASA and has grown quickly. Rackspace turned the project over to the newly formed OpenStack Foundation in April 2012.

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